Panek speaks on dark matter and dark energy

“It’s 1610 all over again,” says author Richard Panek about the scientific revolution that is occurring in astronomy and physics over the universe’s dark mysteries. Panek, who wrote The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality, gave a talk Tuesday evening at Town Hall Seattle.

Panek is a storyteller, not a scientist, and the book is a history of how scientists came to believe in these two mysterious dark forces, and what they’re doing to figure it all out.

He related an amusing anecdote from a recent book signing, at which the cashier at the table read the front flap of the book jacket and exclaimed, “That’s crazy!”

“That’s just about the right response,” Panek said. “That’s the response that I had 10 years ago when I heard people talking about this dark matter and dark energy problem in the universe, and that most of what we thought we knew of the universe for thousands of years is only about four percent of the matter and energy that’s actually out there.”

He originally found the notion too wild to be true, but eventually became a believer.

“The more I looked at it, the more I saw that people in the sciences were trying to knock down these ideas, and they weren’t able to do so,” Panek said. “In fact, they were refining the information and the data in such a way that they were becoming more and more convinced. And as they were becoming convinced, of course I was becoming convinced, and I thought this is really something revolutionary.”

Panek read several sections of the book, including part of the story of the work of astronomer Vera Rubin on galaxy motion that ultimately suggested dark matter. More amusing was a battle between physicists and astronomers in the 1990s as they struggled to come up with a notion of dark energy. The physicists thought the astronomers were encroaching on their turf, and the astronomers felt the physicists didn’t know astronomy. Then a funny thing happened. Both sides reached the same conclusions at the same time and reported them to a skeptical scientific community.

“Part of the reason the community believes them is because these two teams that hated each other so much both came up with this counter-intuitive answer,” Panek said. “If only one of them had, it would have been dismissed, but because both of them had, they had to take it seriously.”

Panek said scientists came up with the percentages by running millions of computer simulations and comparing the results to the observed cosmic microwave background. A universe of 73 percent dark energy, 23 percent dark matter, and four percent for what we can actually see matches well with the observations.

“This is the evidence that astronomers and physicists have found compelling,” he said. “They have this computer simulation, they have this observation, and the two match. The problem, though, is that they don’t know what this 96 percent is.” Panek calls that “the biggest puzzle in physics.”

“It’s going to require reconciliation of the physics of the very small, the quantum level world, and physics of the very big, the general relativity view,” he said. “You have to figure out some way to make those two match.”

The talk, given to a full house at Town Hall Seattle, was well received. The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality, which grew out of a 2007 article published in the New York Times Magazine, should be an interesting read for those who love science, especially its history.

ArtsWest finds the right formula with Emilie

Science and theater don’t always mix, but ArtsWest in West Seattle has pulled it off with an  interesting and entertaining production of Emilie: La Marquise Du Châtelet Defends Her Life Tonight by Lauren Gunderson, directed by Susanna Wilson.

Voltaire (Nick DeSantis) gives Emilie
(Kate Witt) a peck during the ArtsWest
production of Emilie, by Lauren Gunderson,
 running through Feb. 20. Photo: Michael Brunk.

Count yourself as a science history geek if you recognize the name Emilie du Châtelet. Emilie was a force in early 18th-century math and physics, and cooked up the notion of “force vive”, that force is proportional not to an object’s velocity, as Newton and others thought, but to the square of velocity. She also translated, and improved upon, Newton’s Principia Mathematica. Hers is still the standard French translation of Newton’s masterpiece.

If you’re a science geek that probably already sounds like a great premise for a play. But wait, there’s more! It’s also about battles between head and heart, of women in science, and a dandy verbal duel between Emilie, played by Kate Witt, and her lover, the pompous horse’s ass and usually wrong Voltaire (Nick DeSantis).

Witt’s Emilie is reincarnated to tell her life story, in which young Emilie is played by the talented and fetching Sara Coates. (I expect Voltaire may have written that if Sara Coates didn’t exist we would have to invent her. But I digress.) Jason Marr is wonderful as a number of men, including Emilie’s husband, a future lover, and Sir Isaac Newton. Jody McCoy plays a variety of women, including Emilie’s ever-so-proper mother.
Coates gets the kissing scenes because narrator/Emilie Witt gets zapped with electricity and the lights go out if she actually comes into contact with the figures from her past. It underscores the isolation she feels as she toils away in a scientific world that very much belongs to the men.

Witt is fabulous and owns the stage, which is literally her blackboard. Director Wilson and designer Dan Schuy came up with a set that is mostly chalkboard paint, and Emilie scribbles her formulae and diagrams all over the place, as well as her running tally of the good points of love and philosophy. Emilie, a larger-than-life force, wins at everything, including cards. Though for a while there she’s not so sure she’ll win at love.

The end was surprisingly moving. Emilie gets pregnant at 42, and it becomes a race between the very probably deadly childbirth and finishing her translation of Newton.

In an interesting touch, Wilson has Witt remain on stage during the intermission, continuing her studies and making notes and diagrams on the chalkboards. Most of the opening-night audience missed it, but I missed intermission; it was too interesting to watch!

Emilie has crackling dialog and vivid characters, the science and math isn’t too heavy, and it’s a fabulous story. Don’t miss it. It runs at ArtsWest through Feb. 20.

On a road trip to Mars

There may be no better measure of the advance of technology during the space age than a count of photographs from Mars missions. Mariner 4 shot fully 21 pictures when it flew by Mars in 1965. Nearly half a century later, the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity have returned more than 270,000 images from the surface of the Red Planet.

Mariner 4 image showing craters in the Memnonia
Fossae region of Mars. Some folks were still
expecting canals. Photo: NASA, NSSDC.

Ron Hobbs calls the rovers “one of the incredible feats of the space age.” Hobbs, a NASA solar system ambassador, gave a talk titled “The Great Martian Road Trip” during Mars Fest last Saturday at the Museum of Flight in Seattle.

While there weren’t many photos from Mariner, Hobbs said there were enough to debunk a century of belief that there might be a civilization on Mars. Mariner found not canals but craters.

“Overnight Mars went from a place that might have intelligent Martians building civilizations and canals to a place not much different from the Moon,” Hobbs said.

We followed the Mariner mission with the Vikings, which were equipped to look for signs of life.

“At that point we still believed that Mars could be habitable,” Hobbs noted. And the Viking landers actually found signs of life.

“But there was a problem,” Hobbs said. “There were no dead bodies. There was no organic material in the soil.”

With that, scientists concluded there wasn’t much happening on Mars, and we lost interest for a couple of decades. Oddly enough, Viking I may well have found organics, but just didn’t see them. A couple of years ago the Phoenix lander found perchlorates in the soil of Mars, and perchlorates would have masked any organics that Viking may have come across.

Spirit and Opportunity have clearly been the sexy rovers that have captured our imaginations. Hobbs recalled that the museum had a Mars Fest in 2004; Spirit was already on Mars, and Opportunity landed later that night.

“Nobody would have imagined that seven years later at least one of them would still be roving the Martian surface,” he marveled. Spirit is stuck in the sand and quiet, but Opportunity is still rolling and working.

The Museum of Flight had a full-size model of the Mars Science
Lab Curiosity on exhibit last year. The real one is set to launch
this fall. The auto-sized rover includes a rock-zapping laser.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

The next generation of Mars rover is Curiosity, an automobile-sized rover that is scheduled to launch later this year. It’s a complex geochemical laboratory that Hobbs said has a broader mission.

“In addition to looking for water, NASA is now beginning to look for organic materials, that is, carbon-based materials on Mars,” Hobbs said. “The mantra is shifting now from follow the water to follow the carbon.”

Hobbs is enthusiastic about the Mars missions.

“I don’t need any justification for exploring,” he said, adding that his own curiosity compels him to climb hills to see what’s on the other side. “But I do hope that what we’re learning on Mars and some of the other worlds of the solar system will help us protect the only planet that we know of right now where there’s life.”

Zubrin: Humans could be on Mars by 2018

Mars Society founder Robert Zubrin scoffs at the ridiculously complicated and expensive missions that planners keep proposing for getting humans to the Red Planet. Zubrin says that if we decided to go today, we could be there in seven years with a program of Mars exploration that is relatively inexpensive.

Mars Society founder Robert Zubrin, author of The Case for
Mars, signed copies of the book after his talk Saturday at the
 Museum of Flight's Mars Fest. Zubrin says if we decided now
to go to Mars we could be there by 2016.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

Zubrin gave a talk Saturday as part of the Mars Fest at the Museum of Flight in Seattle. He said that it’s important for us to explore Mars.

“Mars is the closest planet to us that has on it all of the resources needed to support life and therefore civilization,” he noted.

A short time-line is critical, according to Zubrin, who says if we set a goal to get to Mars in 30 years it will never happen.

“In 1961 John F. Kennedy committed us to get to the Moon by the end of the decade, and we were there eight years later,” he said. “If in fact John F. Kennedy had instead committed us to get to the moon not by 1970, but by 1990 or the turn of the century, we never would have made it.” New political regimes change the plans, and often existing efforts are scrapped.

Zubrin has a plan for getting to Mars, called Mars Direct. He says it won’t take some sort of super rocket to get to there, and that we can do it with technology we have now using an approach he calls “lift and throw and let it go,” using a rocket with a second booster stage.

“That’s how we’ve done every real, unmanned planetary mission to date, and that’s how we did the Apollo missions to the Moon,” Zubrin noted. “None of these missions beyond lower orbit have ever been done by lifting things up to an orbiting spaceport and transferring them to a Battlestar Galactica-class interplanetary spaceship using a plasma drive that’s been refueled and refurbished in the orbiting navy yard.

“If we can lift and throw the payloads to the planet, right there you’ve gone 90 percent of the way towards taking the mission out of this sort of science fiction future, and putting it in our world of real engineering,” he added.

Since a great deal of the mass of a Mars mission would be fuel for getting back home to Earth, Zubrin suggests we “travel light and live off the land,” sending the return rocket to Mars in 2016, two years ahead of the human explorers, and using chemistry to create methane and oxygen there. When people arrive for an 18-month stint, their return vehicle is ready to go. Every two years you send another return vehicle along with a human exploration crew. Radiation, solar flares, and zero gravity all can be dealt with, he said.

Zubrin has tremendous passion for the idea of human exploration of Mars. He said it’s important to answer the question of whether there was life on Mars, but also whether there will be life there.

“Mars is not just an object of scientific inquiry,” he contended. “It is that. It’s a very important object of scientific inquiry. It is the Rosetta Stone for letting us know the truth about the potential diversity and prevalence of life in the universe. But that is not all it is."

“What Mars actually is, fundamentally, is a world. It is a planet with a surface area equal to all the continents of the Earth put together. It has on it all of the resources needed to support life and civilization. If we can learn how to use those resources, we can make Mars habitable.”

That wouldn’t happen overnight. Rather, Zubrin said our generation has the chance to make Mars intellectually habitable.

“If we can go to Mars and develop the craft of making use of Mars’ resources,” he said, “then Mars becomes a place where human beings can support themselves, and where a new branch of human civilization can develop and grow, and in the fullness of time grow in size and extent and technological and industrial capability where it can begin to address the question of the actual physical transformation of Mars.

“By so doing we set into motion the process where we not only bring life to Mars, we bring Mars to life.”

America, Zubrin says, needs the challenge.

“To say that we can’t do it, that we have to wait for futuristic developments, is just to say that we have become less than the kind of people we used to be, and that is something that I think this country cannot afford,” he concluded.

After the talk Zubrin signed copies of his book, The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must. The book spells out Mars Direct in detail. A Wikipedia entry gives a good summary with lots of technical information.

Amazing Ressmeyer photos on exhibit at ArtsWest

Roger Ressmeyer figures he’s dodged death at least 15 times while photographing volcanos and earthquakes and other forces of nature, but faced those dangerous situations with peace and calm, always figuring he’d be OK. So it’s amusing that he admitted to being a little nervous giving a talk for about a hundred people at his first photography exhibit in 17 years. Ressmeyer spoke Thursday at a reception marking the opening of his exhibit, The Beginning of Totality, which runs through Jan. 30 at the ArtsWest Gallery in West Seattle.

The Roger Ressmeyer photo used for this poster about the
Beginning of Totality exhibit was used on the cover of the live
album "On the Night" by Dire Straits. Photo courtesy ArtsWest.

Ressmeyer made a name for himself as a celebrity photographer beginning in the ’70s, and his work graced music album covers, book jackets, People magazine, and others. He had a boyhood interest in space and astronomy, however, and by the mid-’80s began to point his camera up at a different type of star.

“In my career I’ve been able to witness some of the most astounding events that humankind can ever experience,” Ressmeyer said. “I’m lucky that as a young boy I became fascinated with outer space. All I wanted to do was to photograph the things that I got to photograph later for National Geographic and other publications.”

As suggested by the title of the exhibit, Ressmeyer is especially fascinated with the total eclipse of the Sun.

“During totality of a solar eclipse, the range of light that the human eye can see is beyond any other experience you’ll have under normal conditions,” he noted. “From the brilliant burst of sunlight to the last little speck of light that causes the diamond ring, to the outer corona, to the effect of the lighting on the environment, its like walking into a world where suddenly your eyes are given a whole other dimension of depth.”

For the photographer and other viewers, viewing a total solar eclipse is an emotional event.
“Once totality hits, even people who have seen many eclipses start making orgasmic sounds,” Ressmeyer said. “It is an amazing experience.”

He saw and photographed his first solar eclipse at age 15, and has now seen 11 of them.

This Ressmeyer photo, Star Trails Above
 Observatory, was shot at the Canada France
 Hawaii telescope atop Mauna Kea. A
print is on display as part of "The
Beginning of Totality" exhibit.
Photo courtesy of ArtsWest.

The exhibit includes several photographs of solar eclipses and other astronomical subjects, including comet Hale-Bopp, the Moon rising over a cathedral in Moscow, Russia, a sunset at Stonehenge, a space shuttle launch, and the dishes of the Very Large Array in New Mexico. Also on display at ArtsWest are Ressmeyer’s photos of volcanic eruptions, an amazing thunderstorm over Chicago, and the aftermath of an earthquake. His work has appeared in scores of publications, including Life, Time, Newsweek, Discover, Smithsonian, The New York Times Magazine, and National Geographic.

They’re all astounding.

In 1985 Ressmeyer sold the rights to his photos to Bill Gates and Corbis. Since then the photographer has mostly worked as an administrator, first for Corbis and then for Getty Images. He didn’t find that time so fulfilling for his heart and soul.

“This exhibit represents me coming out of the hole,” he explained. “I have had a reawakening. I am in the vortex as Abraham-Hicks would call it. I am being spiritually guided. Going through and creating this exhibit represents to me rediscovering that side of myself.”

Ressmeyer also is getting back into photography with a new agency called Science Faction, which aims to showcase extraordinary photography.

“Science Faction represents the work of some of the world’s greatest science photographers. We’re trying to maintain a ‘Mercedes Benz’ kind of place,” Ressmeyer said. “We represent photographers whose work can’t be replicated by amateurs with digital cameras. You can’t get access to what these guys do.” They’re photographers with million-dollar observatories or electron microscopes in their basements.

The Beginning of Totality runs at ArtsWest through Jan. 30. Fans of astronomy and photography should not miss it. Admission is free. The gallery is open from noon until 7 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.

Storm on Saturn, and a Voorwerp

There are a couple of great new posts up on Alice’s Astro Info by Alice Enevoldsen this week.
The first, Storm on Saturn—With a Tail, was posted Sunday. It’s a great summary of a new storm that turned up on Saturn at the end of 2010. It’s about the same size as the Great Red Spot on Jupiter.

Cassini captured this photo of the storm on Saturn on Christmas
 Eve, 2010. Photo: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.

We tried to spot this storm from Seattle Astronomy headquarters in West Seattle during that rare, clear weather we had over the holidays. Alas, while we had a couple of good looks at Saturn, it was still pretty low in the sky, a bit murky, and we couldn’t make out enough detail to spot the storm. (St. Nick delivered a new Tele Vue 10mm Radian eyepiece we were hoping would help tease it out, but even great new optics didn’t get us there.) Even today Saturn isn’t rising until a little after midnight. It’s plenty high before sunrise, but we’re a lot better at staying up until 3 a.m. than we are at rising at 5:00, so we haven’t seen the ringed planet at its best, and probably won’t until it’s at opposition in early April.

We’re rolling the dice by waiting to try to see this storm. While the Red Spot has been around for centuries, this Saturn storm popped up out of nowhere and could fade back into the yellow-orange haze of Saturn just as quickly.

The other new article, posted today, is about Hanny’s Voorwerp. It looks kind of like an enormous cosmic frog in an amazing Hubble photograph included in the post, but in actual fact is a light echo. Enevoldsen is a physics and astronomy genius and explains the phenomenon very well. I just think it looks cool. And I like to type the word Voorwerp. Voorwerp, voorwerp, voorwerp. It’s Dutch for “object,” and Hanny’s Voorwerp was discovered by a Dutch schoolteacher using Galaxy Zoo.

Keep an eye on Alice’s Astro Info for great notes about what’s up in the sky.

Space age materials being developed in Seattle

Brian Flinn’s job is to build a better composite, to create materials that are “stronger, stiffer, smarter and safer for applications in aerospace and automobiles.” Flinn, a research associate professor with the University of Washington Department of Materials Science and Engineering, gave a talk last week as part of the Science Café series sponsored by the Pacific Science Center and KCTS television.

Brian Flinn. Photo: UW

Flinn noted that composites have been around for a long time, but “they’ve been in the news a lot in Seattle recently because of a certain airplane,” the Boeing 787.

Historians tag different epochs with the names of the dominant material of the time.

“If you look at the history of man, it was the Stone age, the Bronze Age, the Iron age,” Flinn said. He then played a clip from the 1967 film “The Graduate,” in which Mr. McGuire told Benjamin Braddock about plastics. “As a materials scientist that’s one of my favorite movie clips,” he quipped.

By then the polymer age was in full swing. Now composites are really booming, though Flinn said they aren’t all that complicated.

“A composite is where you take two different materials and mix them together to make a new material,” Flinn explained. “This new material isn’t just an atomic mix or a material like an alloy or a solution. You actually have two or more distinct phases that retain some of the properties of what you mixed together.

“The objective is really to try to take the best properties from two different materials, put them together, and use what’s called the principle of combined action to get an average of the properties that is not available in either one of the materials by themselves.”

This is especially important in aerospace applications where weight is a penalty, because you can design materials that are both strong and light, Flinn said. That’s where the 787 is so revolutionary in his view: the plane is about half composites by weight but 80 percent composites by volume. The non-composite components are much heavier.

Much of Flinn’s work these days involves figuring out how to assemble composite parts. If you bolt them together it’s bad, because holes drilled in the parts weaken the composite, and bolts or rivets add weight.

“If you glue them together it’s much better,” he said. “The question is, how much do you trust your glue?”

It’s a good question. One way around it is to build larger parts that are essentially molds that don’t need fastening. Some aircraft doors, for example, are now being created as one piece.

Another area of research involves finding ways to learn if composite parts are damaged. Adding sensors and wires adds weight and complexity. Instead, they’re working on smart composites.

“What we want to do is called molecular engineering,” Flinn said. “You actually design your molecules that you add into the composite that will tell you things about what’s going on there. These are called molecular sensors.”

Composites are already in wide use in spacecraft and aerospace, but Flinn noted more industries are catching on to the advantages. Medicine and wind energy are a couple of examples. The auto industry is another. A new Lamborghini that can do 0-to-60 in about 2.5 seconds is largely made of carbon fiber composite. And Flinn expects composites to be key to design of a better electric car.

A video of Flinn’s talk will be archived on the KCTS website.

Seattle astronomy calendar for week of Jan. 10

AAS in Seattle
Thousands of scientists from all over the world converge on Seattle this week for the 217th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Sessions will be held from Jan. 10-13 at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center. Check the meeting website for complete information.

The Beginning of Totality
Renowned photojournalist Roger Ressmeyer will have his works on display in a solo exhibit titled The Beginning of Totality at the ArtsWest Gallery in West Seattle from Jan. 11-30. Ressmeyer, a Mercer Island resident, made his mark as a celebrity photographer, but in the 1980s returned to a childhood interest and began to turn his cameras to the night sky and things scientific. His work has appeared in Life, Time, Newsweek, Discover, Smithsonian, The New York Times Magazine, Stern, National Geographic and Geo, among others.

You can meet Ressmeyer at a reception at ArtsWest at 6 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 13. He’ll give a talk about his work in the ArtsWest theatre at 7:30 p.m.

The Globe at Night
Dr. Connie Walker, senior science education specialist with the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, will speak at the meeting of the Boeing Employees Astronomical Society at 7 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 13. Walker manages the observatory’s Globe at Night program as well as Dark Skies Awareness, an IYA 2009 cornerstone project.

Non-employees are welcome at BEAS, but need to make arrangements in advance for an escort to Boeing property. Check the website for details.